Tracking Trump - Direction of the Country for August 18th:
Bottom Line: This Friday feature is designed for political junkies. For years, despite generally favorable approval ratings for President Obama, we'd collectively been unhappy with the overall direction of our country. In the early months of the Trump Presidency we're seeing a bit of a shift with a less popular President but a bit more optimistic country generally.
In this entry I'll be tracking the overall view of the direction of the country led by President Trump.
Here's where we stood on Inauguration Day:
Right Direction: 30%
Wrong Track: 59.1%
Net Negative: -29.1%
August 4th ratings (last update):
Right Direction: 29.3%
Wrong Track: 59.7%
Net Negative: -30.4%
And today:
Right Direction: 29.75%
Wrong Track: 59.75%
Net Negative: 30%
Change: -.9% since Inauguration Day & +.4% from two weeks ago
We're still slightly less optimistic about the direction of the country as compared to where we were under the Obama administration but for the second consecutive update there's actually slight improvement. Like the President's approval rating, this might seem odd given the rabid, absurdly negative media landscape this week but again - some people may have really just had enough of the relentless effort to take out President Trump and to overstate the relevance of "white supremacists" in the United States (it's demonstrably lower today than at any point in recorded American history). And then there's our own lives. The economy is continuing to generally improve. That tends to matter most in the long run.
Until next week...